The invention disclosed in this application uses any type modulation and more particularly works with a method of modulation now known by its commercial designation, xMax. This new wireless physical layer technology developed by xG Technology Inc., referred to as xMAX, enables extremely low power omni-directional transmissions to be received in a wide area. Using xMAX, significant bandwidth can be made available for supporting various wireless applications. Voice Over IP (VoIP) based cellular services are now being developed using xMAX. In xMAX-based cellular networks both the base station and the handsets will be equipped with an xMAX transceiver. A mobile device (xMAX handset) in such a network will be free to move in an area covered by multiple xMAX base stations. Although this layer-2 hand-off mechanism for cellular systems designed to operate in unlicensed spectrum that does not use any pre-determined thresholds to initiate the hand-offs is disclosed in the preferred embodiment as being used in these types of integer cycle and pulse modulation systems it can be implemented on any broad band wireless technologies like WiMax, WiBro, WiFi, 3GPP and HSDPA, or any other type of wired or wireless voice or data systems.
A heterogeneous MAC protocol proposed to support VoIP traffic in xMAX wireless networks has been discussed in previously filed patent applications U.S. Ser. Nos.: 12/069,057; 12/070,815; 12/380,698; 12/384,546; 12/386,648; 12,387,811; 12/387,807, 12/456,758, 12/456,725, 12/460,497, 12/583,627, 12/583,644, 12/590,472, 12/590,469, 12/590,931, 12/653,021, 12/653,007 and 12/657,324 which are incorporated by reference into this disclosure. In the heterogeneous MAC protocol described in these applications, guaranteed timeslots are assigned to forward VOIP packets, temporary timeslots are assigned to forward data packets and contention based access is used to exchange control messages. Note that this heterogeneous MAC protocol is used here as a reference protocol and similarly xMAX as a reference wireless network. The idea of a system and method for a layer-2 hand-off mechanism for cellular systems designed to operate in unlicensed spectrum that does not use any pre-determined thresholds to initiate the hand-offs as described herein can be used in other relevant systems.